“Bolt? I had to get shoes. Who’s Melanie?” For a moment, he truly didn’t know; the name sounded unfamiliar, the wrong name for the figure in his thoughts.
“
Melanie
,” Holly repeated. “My roommate. The one you can’t stop checking out. I’ve told her all about you. I was trying to help you two connect—you know—boy/girl?” She twined her middle finger over her index finger. “Didn’t you realize that?”
“No.”
“Wow. You’re pretty out to lunch.” She squatted and peered at him. “Are you okay?”
“Rusty thinks she’s hot,” Charlie offered. “He was talking to her when I left.”
Holly stood. “She wanted to meet
you
.”
“Why? What did you tell her about me?”
Holly, who knew him better than anybody—by instinct, or because their mothers had been inseparable as girls, or because she’d spent the better part of her childhood with him—just shrugged and walked away. She was his favorite cousin, at once intuitive and cheerful despite her mother’s instability (yet how accepting Dossy was, compared to his own mother, how much less critical, swept by the current, it seemed, instead of fighting it). By this time, he was more than a little drunk. As he watched Holly navigate the rocks back to the group, it occurred to him that he might actually be, for that moment, precisely what he looked like: a college student at a beach party, a barefoot boy in the prime of his life, hands slick with butter and smelling of shellfish, desire rising for a pretty girl.
He followed Holly over to the group, moving easily over the rocks. It was dark by now and the fire had died down, but the moon cast a watery light. He made himself sit next to Holly, who sat next to her roommate. Then, so fluidly it seemed a trick of nature, Holly disappeared.
“Hi,” said the roommate. Melanie.
He formed the word back. “Hi.”
“I’m Holly’s roommate, Melanie. We started to meet, before—”
“Yeah. I know. Sorry. I—I had to get something.”
“That’s all right.” She leaned toward him, chin in hands. “I think I’ve answered the hall phone when you’ve called. Holly talks about you a lot.”
“Uh-oh,” he said.
He should not have had the beers, could feel his mind go loose, the world grow dim, and the girl’s voice was talking on unperturbed, something about Wellesley, then about his family, how cool it was, and Ashaunt, how lucky they were, I mean her family rented in Maine but it wasn’t the same, not a place like this where everyone could be together and so tight, and he said yeah (vise tight, tight enough to blow a fuse), and then she stopped, gazed at him, head tilted, hands tucked inside her cuffs; it hurt him to look, she was so pretty. He shifted and sat on his own hands, looked down.
Oh to have instinct do the work. He’d watched spotted turtles mate in the sand at the pond near the gate, watched dragonflies do it, a blur of wings, their tails connecting in a circle, and afterward, locked stillness. He’d watched dogs fuck, had even caught Will with his high school girlfriend behind the barn in Bernardsville, bare-assed to the wind. Melanie seemed finally to have registered the fact that he was not fully inside the conversation. She sat back, rocked on her heels, and took another tack: Do you maybe want to swim?
And so shirts off—her flannel, his T—and down the dock and stairs and into the cold smack of the ocean, where he could barely see her, just her wet hair and the outline of her face and rising arms (she started with a strong crawl, slowed to breaststroke). In his family, it was mostly the women who were swimmers; Charlie was usually in and out, and now he struggled slightly to keep up. Across his mind ran, willy-nilly, a stream of standard-issue questions: How do you like college? How long have you known Holly? Where are you from? Instead he asked nothing, nor did she speak, though she slowed down and swam alongside him. On the beach someone played the guitar, the group singing off-key—a song he didn’t recognize. Then they had reached the raft and he was on it, and as she tried to get on, his hand reached out to pull her up. There. Very good. She sat dripping beside him. In the dark he could see only the half-outlines of her body. It was windy out of the water; they would soon grow cold. From shore, the song reached them piecemeal: “
Just a little rain . . . falling all around . . . what have they done . . .”
“I love that song,” said Melanie.
“What is it?”
“Joan Baez.” She began to sing along: “
And the grass is gone, the boy disappears, and rain keeps falling like helpless tears, and what have they done to the rain?
”
She stopped. He wanted to ask her to go on. The song was sad and lovely; her voice, pure and clear and a little quavering on the high notes, was too—but on the beach they’d started in on something more raucous.
“It’s pretty,” he said.
Melanie nodded. “The bizarre thing is, it’s about the fallout from aboveground nuclear testing. On the record, she says it’s the gentlest protest song she knows. I live for Joan Baez. Do you know her stuff?”
“A little. I should listen to more.”
“She’ll blow you away. She’s really political, but she has a voice from heaven. Holly told me you’re living out here by yourself all summer, in a cabin with no running water.”
“Yeah.” Had Holly failed to mention that the Red House and the Big House, with their showers, sinks and toilets, were each not even a hundred yards away?
“Cool. You don’t get lonely when no one’s around?”
“No,” he said, then lied (or was it true?). “Sometimes. A little.”
“I crewed on a schooner for June,” she said. “It was ridiculously crowded. They bring camp groups for overnights and the crew all gets stuck in one cabin. But I got lonely anyway, maybe because there was no space, if that makes sense. There were, like, ten of us. We slept”—she held up her hands, a few inches apart—“like this.”
“I’ve never done that.” He may as well have declared it:
I’m still a virgin
.
“It was a drag in some ways,” she said, “but great in others, especially at night when everyone except the night crew was asleep. I’d climb up to the crow’s nest and sit there in the dark and wind, just clinging on. It was . . . I don’t know, impossible to describe.”
“It sounds amazing,” he said.
“It was. It was one of those extreme experiences you can’t put words to. Existential, even. Does that sound ridiculous? I don’t talk about it much. I tried to tell my mom about it, but she freaked out at the idea of me up there. She thinks I take too many risks.”
“You held on,” he said.
“For my life.”
Even in the cold, he was getting a hard-on, and he could feel the attention of everyone on the beach, the silent urging:
Go for it, make a move
. But then he didn’t have to. She scooted closer.
“You can”—she leaned until their shoulders bumped— “kiss me if you want. Or if you’re not into that, I mean, that’s cool too. . . .”
He put his hand on the wet nylon of her bathing suit, felt the small of her back as her lips came toward him, pursed and cold at first, then open—bone teeth, muscled tongue—and for a moment he leaned in, his whole body wanting her, for he was only human, could it really be this easy, to swim through dark water into this? They necked, heads turning, chins knocking, finding new angles. He felt the knob of her hipbone, found her ear and, without thinking, spoke close to it. “I wish I’d been there on that boat with you.”
“Really?” She moved back, her smile broad. “Wow, thanks. Me too.”
They kissed again, her hand tracing the waistband of his shorts, pulling on fabric, grazing the zipper, and he let out a little moan.
Melanie pulled back. “So, um, everyone can see us. They’re going to starting cheering soon. Could we maybe go somewhere, like to your cabin?”
Yes, he should have said immediately, but no words came. He had condoms in the drawer under the bed, bought in a foolish moment of hopefulness a few years back. He had candles, and orange butterfly weed and turk’s-cap lilies in a jar. He had a record player. (And prescription pill bottles on the table, and a book called
Understanding Your Panic Disorder
, and a paper bag to breathe into, and a notebook where he recorded, daily, how many miles he’d run, which birds and flowers he’d seen, along with the circumstances that preceded his panic attacks, as if with a pattern might come comprehension, but there was no pattern, at least not yet. He had his mummy sleeping bag—cradle, straitjacket, sized for one.)
Once more, he willed himself to kiss her, but it was already too late; his mind had yanked him back into the long, cold view. It was as if he could see them kissing, two specks—she warm-blooded, open-minded,
normal
, he a body full of urges but with its feelings sealed off, his mind a capsule lodged inside his body. He could peer out, observe, but through a slick-walled, bloodless barrier of glass. If things went forward, even a little, he would feel it more, he knew: how alone he was, how lost inside himself, the isolation easier to tolerate when he was, in fact, alone.
And then, as if on cue, his hands were trembling, his teeth knocking together; she’d pulled back, was looking at him—You’re shivering, babe, are you all right?—and he said, Listen, I’m really sorry, I’ve got to get back, I’m not feeling well (
and the grass is gone, the boy disappears
), and before she could answer he was in the water, turning once to see her swimming after him, and though he forced himself to stay only a few strokes ahead, he did not speak, and when they got to shore, to the group stifling laughter (someone flashed a victory—or was it a peace sign?), he smelled pot, grabbed his shirt (forgot the shoes) and ran.
A FEW DAYS LATER, HE
tried to explain to Dr. Miller what he could not explain to Holly, or to Melanie, who’d left early the next morning before he’d had a chance to apologize or say good-bye. How for the body to want and the mind to detach was an impossible equation, and he’d give up beer, he’d give up parties, girls, sex, all thoughts of sex, if only he could just be left alone.
“It sounds as if she liked you,” said Dr. Miller, who charged these phone sessions to his parents but asked Charlie to pay a token two dollars a session himself.
“She didn’t know me.”
“Was attracted to you, then. And maybe to what she’d heard about you. The swimming and conversation sound nice. So does the intimacy. There was a connection, no?”
“A normal person would have felt one, but I didn’t.”
“What if you’d let it go further? Explored a little more. Physically, I mean. Without thinking about it too much. What would you have risked?”
“You can’t do that if—” Now Charlie was stuttering. “You c-c-c—can’t—”
A minute passed, then another. The July renters had canceled at the last minute. The Red House kitchen floor was filthy. Over the weekend, his mother had decided to pay him to clean the house and clear brush after they left, but so far he’d done no cleaning and only a little clipping, and he wouldn’t cut down so much as a twig from behind the house, where she wanted a better sea view and he wanted a thicket where the cabin could hide.
“You felt desire,” said the doctor finally. “Do you see how that could be a good, even a hopeful, thing? Not that you need to act on it. There’s no rush. You’re young and you’ve been through a lot. But to feel a connection—”
“Once,” Charlie said, “I caught a fish and cut off its head. Ten minutes later, the head almost bit my finger off. I had to get stitches.”
“That’s a funny story, but you’re not dead, Charlie.”
“I didn’t say I was dead. I said a dead fish bit me.”
“And the significance of this is—?”
“You’re the shrink.”
“But what do you think?”
“Um . . . don’t bite the hand that kills you?”
Dr. Miller laughed. “Did you know Freud dissected fish before he turned to people? Eels, to be specific. Of course, others would say a fish is just a fish. I’m afraid we’re out of time.”
“I need more Valium. Can you phone it in? And maybe something else. Is there anything else? That might get to, you know, the core?”
“We’ve tried a number of medications already,” said Dr. Miller. “You’re sensitive to side effects, and none of them have been very helpful. You’re making progress, Charlie. Can you see that?”
Thank you, Charlie wanted to say. For having faith in me. For not thinking I’m a lazy, selfish shit. For being, above all, kind. Once he had followed Dr. Miller after spotting him on the street, had lurked half a block behind as the good doctor moved—alone and somehow tentative in the suit and bow tie he always wore—out of the university district, finally disappearing into a low brick office building whose sign announced a Ladies’ Depilatory Service and an insurance agency.
“Then Valium,” Charlie said.
“How many do you have left?”
He took the jar from his pocket. Three pills, barely enough to make a rattle. “One,” he lied.
“I’ll phone it in,” the doctor said.
F
OR THREE DAYS
after that, Charlie spoke to no one and drove to town only once, to pick up the prescription and buy a pair of canvas tennis sneakers at Mars and, even more reluctantly, a pack of tube socks. He did not shop for food that day; he was living off leftovers, first those he’d been given, and then, after he’d made the round of houses, stuff he took from cupboards and fridges before the cleaners came. In the Big House, he found chocolate and orange juice, a carton of milk, stale shortbread, lemons, a few apples. At the Childs’, an untouched roast chicken that he smelled, deemed fresh enough, and ate at their kitchen table, tossing the bones into the bushes when he left. At the Stricklands’, almost nothing (half his relatives, like Jane, despised waste; the other half, like his mother, let food rot and turn to mold). The Red House was rented now, so he couldn’t go there; voices came from the house—children shouting, a mother calling, new people he didn’t know.
If the door of a house was locked, he used a back window. If he found food to bring to the cabin, he put it in his rucksack, and the feeling he had was not of trespassing, exactly; it was both dreamier than that and more permissive, each house so familiar, the halls and kitchens of his childhood, when you did not come home for meals, except sometimes for dinner. Hungry ruffians, Bea and Agnes used to call the gang, for they’d charge into the Big House kitchen starving and expectant and depart again two minutes later, leaving crumbs and apple cores behind.